PyHoca-GUI is designed as a very minimal GUI that behaves very similar to GNOME's network manager applet (nm-applet). It appears as a small Phoca icon (a little seal) that docks to your systray panel (also called notification area) and allows you to manage multiple X2go sessions simultaneously.

Command Line Arguments

PyHoca-GUI has a man page. Considering that it actually is a GUI there are quite some command line options to choose from.

On your GNU/Linux system execute

$ man pyhoca-gui

An always up-to-date html version of the pyhoca-gui man page can be be retrieved from the X2go Git repository: man pyhoca-gui.

Launching PyHoca-GUI

You can launch PyHoca-GUI by typing pyhoca-gui on the command line (from a terminal) or by starting it from your desktop's application menu (topic: Internet).

PyHoca-GUI will appear on your desktop as a small icon that docks into your systray (as the GNOME applet for Network Manager does). Find this icon—it looks like a little white seal on grey background.

Note that on Ubuntu 12.04 or later, the Unity interface does not allow PyHoca-gui to create the systray icon. To enable this, we need to edit the gsettings. To allow all applications in the systray, type this in the terminal.

$ gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"

If you would rather whitelist a set of applications, use this command instead, where YOUR_APPLICATION is 'pyhoca-gui'

Profile Manager

PyHoca-GUI on Linux uses the same configuration files as X2Go Client. (The Windows version of X2Go Client writes its session profiles into HKCU of the Windows registry).
Thus PyHoca-GUI should work out of the box for most setups and user profiles on a (Linux) system with a working X2Go Client configuration.

If you are new to X2Go and try PyHoca-GUI for the first time, then you have to add a session profile for your (first) X2Go server by right-clicking on the PyHoca-GUI systray icon.

If you right-click on the PyHoca-GUI icon you are offered a sub-menu called Profile Manager. From there, you can create new X2Go session profiles and access all your already defined X2Go session profiles, as well.

When selection the Session type in the profile manager, note that newer versions of the GNOME 3 and UNITY desktop environments have compatibility issues with X2Go. See the page Desktop Environment Compatibility for more details.

Starting Sessions

The usage logic of PyHoca-GUI is a little bit different from that of X2Go Client. In PyHoca-GUI you first authenticate to an X2Go Server and then you start/resume sessions. It takes a little time to get used to that different concept, but you will soon get to like the advantages of this two-step session startup logic.

To start a PyHoca-GUI session left-click on the PyHoca icon and then choose Authenticate X2go Server to be presented with a list of existing session profiles.

After you have authenticated against one of your configured server session profiles, you can access the authenticated session profile by left-clicking the PyHoca-GUI icon. Navigate through the GUI's menu from there, most of it should be self-explanatory.

Further Readings

For further readings, please also consult the README and TODO documentation files in the PyHoca-GUI source tree on the X2Go upstream Git site.